Roaring Days: Rossland's Mines and the History of British Columbia

William A. Waiser is a professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan, and the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History
of Prince Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of
Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.

Probably the most famous B.C. mining adventure was the 1858 Cariboo gold
rush, when some 25,000 stampeders descended on the Fraser River in
search of instant wealth. It was an epic event that left its mark on the
region—only to be surpassed almost four decades later by the Yukon’s
Klondike gold rush. What seems to have been largely forgotten about
B.C.’s mining past, however, was an even more important discovery in
the southwest corner of the province in the late 19th century. Here, in
the heart of the Kootenays, promising ore bodies were staked on Red Rock
Mountain in 1890. And although the gold and other minerals had to be
extracted using hard-rock methods, the richness of the find overlooking
Trail Creek spawned one of the greatest mining developments in the
province’s history.

Roaring Days is the story of the dramatic rise and decline of the
Rossland mines at a time when new resource discoveries seemed to confirm
the great promise of Canada. Mouat describes how initial locational and
production problems were quickly overcome, transforming the region into
one of the provincial economy’s early 20th-century economic engines.
He also recounts how hand tools and dynamite quickly gave way to a
modern, sophisticated operation that not only used the latest extraction
and processing techniques, but was organized along international
corporate lines. And he provides an intimate portrait of the region’s
miners—of the lives they led both below and above ground and how they
organized to try to bring about some control over their industrial
lives.

Although Roaring Days still reads in places like a dissertation, Mouat
does a good job in explaining how hard-rock mining defined the character
of the region and its inhabitants. He also ably demonstrates how outside
international forces shaped and controlled the pace of development in
the mines. Above all, he suggests that the Roseland experience was not a
simple case of western exceptionalism and that what happened in the
Kootenays had wider implications for the province and our national
history.